


it wasn't difficult to pull me from myself again

by procrastinatingbookworm



Series: all the living are dead, and the dead are all living [2]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Character Study, Cultural Differences, F/M, No Romance, Porn With Plot, Queerplatonic Relationships, Self-Indulgent, Sex, Trans Male Character, Vaginal Fingering, Weird Biology, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:14:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28079739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: Hornet and Quirrel cross paths again, to their mutual benefit.
Relationships: Hornet/Quirrel (Hollow Knight)
Series: all the living are dead, and the dead are all living [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2057055
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39





	it wasn't difficult to pull me from myself again

**Author's Note:**

> thnx to feralphoenix for both irl research abt pillbug and spider anatomy that i shameless borrowed from her fics and used here as well as being hype abt this fic even tho it's probably the rarest of my rarepairs in this fandom.

Hornet walks through Deepnest without urgency.

She swings herself around the Garpedes, the pattern of their crawling long since memorized. Even with her carapace aching and her limbs trembling, she can traverse the darkened corridors easily, so long as she takes her time.

The little ghost bested her again. They nearly cut her down—they would have, if she hadn’t retreated. They walked, nail in hand, into the Cast-off Shell and taken the King’s Brand onto their hand.

She should have let them die beneath the collapsing ash. She intended to.

But they are her sibling. For all that she hates the Wyrm that bore them both—for all that they will never know Hornet’s mother, and for all that she will forever hate the Root that bore them—they are still her sibling.

Perhaps that was why she followed them into the Shell, on a thread of silk. Perhaps that was why she didn’t flee when it began to crumble, and instead dropped along with the shell’s oily detritus, to cover them with her body. 

Perhaps that was why she lifted them in two of her arms and flung her needle through the falling ash, freeing them both from their father’s trap.

(Ha!—As if they, or anyone in Hallownest, could escape the Wyrm’s choking shadow. As if death were not the closest thing to freedom, as if thwarting it were not a victory for the Wyrm.)

Perhaps it was the sense of sameness—the one that had led her, years before, to hold a different vessel in her arms—that drove her to save them.

Perhaps it was the memory of Quirrel, looking up at her from beneath the shadow of a Dreamer’s mask—a Dreamer like Hornet’s mother, bequeathed a duty just like her, even if he doesn’t remember it—telling her that the little ghost is the only thing worth saving out of Hallownest’s corpse.

Hornet doesn’t know. She has killed vessels before. She has let them die. She doesn’t know why this ghost of her father’s crimes is different.

She’s too tired. Her mind is fogged with pain. She needs a long rest in the hot spring before she can begin to unravel her thoughts.

Hopping over a Garpede’s trailing feet, she drops down into a lower tunnel, walking at a slight crouch into the hot spring’s wide-open, brightly-lit room.

As if summoned by her wandering thoughts, Quirrel is there.

He looks… at ease?

That’s strange. Hornet hasn’t met a bug yet, aside from those who lived their whole lives in Deepnest, that felt at ease within it. 

For all that its sounds and silk and shaking soothes Hornet, she understands how it frightens bugs that don’t consider it home. There is an uncertainty that lingers, a mistrust, until its sprawling, curling layout is as well-memorized as the art of wielding a nail.

But Quirrel seems perfectly at peace.

He lounges in the hot spring, his nail leaning against the bench at the far end of the room, entirely out of arms’ reach.

“Do you not fear this place?” Hornet asks.

Quirrel startles, the water splashing a little around his hands, but he relaxes when he recognizes her. “Hello, Hornet. No, I daresay I don’t. The wanderer—you’ve just missed them, once again, they were resting in this spring not too long ago—seemed somewhat discomfited, but I don’t mind.”

Strange.

“Should I be?” he asks, after a moment, with what seems to be genuine curiosity.

Hornet doesn’t have an answer.

“You look worn, my dear,” Quirrel says, in a gentle voice that makes something in Hornet tighten like a line of stitches pulled taut. “Rest a while.”

Hornet peels off her cape and sinks into the hot spring, unable to suppress a sigh as the soul-infused water begins to heal her carapace. 

Quirrel watches her with his soft, fathomless eyes.

“I have seen many bugs enter this place,” Hornet says, nudging her cape away from the water’s edge. “All have feared it. Why not you?”

Quirrel shrugs. “Of all the places in Hallownest, I find it the most predictable. Very little violence is necessary, if one is quick on their feet.”

“I see,” Hornet says, mildly distracted by the heated water against her carapace, making her shudder as it soaks away the chill. She sinks deeper into the spring, until only her head is above the water.

“The worst of the creatures here are the ones that hide within the shells of other bugs,” Quirrel says, with a shudder. “But they are hardly the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in this kingdom.”

“What is?” Hornet asks, before she can stop herself.

Quirrel looks at her, steadily, unflinchingly. For a moment, Hornet catches sight of a familiar, unfathomable grief—the same emptiness that lingered in her mother’s eyes when she talked about her home before Deepnest.

“Everyone who lived here is dead,” Quirrel says, dropping his gaze. “And plenty of those deaths had nothing to do with the Infection.” He splays his hands, above the surface of the spring, ripples spreading outward from where his clawtips brush the water. “The Infection is just a symptom of some greater illness, if you’ll permit the metaphor.”

Hornet drags in a breath and sighs it out. “How much do you remember?”

Quirrel laughs without humor. “Fragments, if that. Details without context. A sense of familiarity.”

Without seeming to notice he’s doing it, he touches the mask he wears atop his head, and Hornet thinks  _ are they going to kill your mother too? _

She extends her hand to him.

In a perfect mirror to the last time they shared a moment like this, Quirrel reaches back.

“I assume this is the part where we have sex,” Hornet says.

Quirrel’s solemness breaks on a chuckle. “If you’d like.”

“I’d like to be introduced to your anatomy,” Hornet says. “If that’s agreeable to you.”

Quirrel nods. He lets go of her hand, lifting himself out of the hot spring to perch on the edge.

“I have two slits,” he tells her, resting his fingers on them. “Here and here. They’re not very sensitive, so don’t worry about being too rough.”

Hornet shifts forward in the water, arranging herself so she’s at the right height for her task. Quirrel’s using his claws to spread his slits open, as if he’s baring himself for examination.

It’s attractive. He’s attractive, in a purely physical way, divorced from whatever else Hornet might feel toward him.

She starts with her hands. Two hands on his thighs and two on his stomach, holding him steady for her. A hand for each of his slits, one finger apiece working into his entrances, testing his reaction.

Quirrel groans softly. “Ah. Yes, that’s good, that’s good, Hornet.”

Hornet chuckles softly, working her fingers deeper into Quirrel’s slits, hooking them slightly. “I’ve barely started.”

“Take it as encouragement,” Quirrel says, his voice gone hoarse in his throat. Hornet can feel his stomach tensing under her hands.

“I feel very encouraged,” Hornet replies, slipping in a second finger on each side, basking in the choked-off groan Quirrel gives her in response.

Working her fingers in and out makes Quirrel moan, breathy and uneven. When she presses further than she’d been before, he mumbles gratitude in a voice gone ragged on the edges.

He  _ whines _ when she curls her fingers, a sound that makes Hornet press her legs together and catch her breath.

When she adds a third finger, Quirrel takes one of her hands from his thigh, lacing their fingers together, and little sparks travel up Hornet’s arm.

Quirrel shifts forward. “It’s rather cold,” he murmurs, his voice a low rasp. “Mind if I join you back in the water?”

Once again, Hornet ends up in Quirrel’s lap, although  _ her _ fingers are inside  _ him _ , this time.

It’s not a perfect angle. Hornet has to hold her arms at a strange angle to keep fingering Quirrel without slipping off his lap. If she didn’t have another pair of arms to wrap around his shoulders, she’d probably fall anyway.

It’s worth it. Quirrel feels as hot inside as the water around them, clenching down around her fingers whenever she so much as twitches them.

“Hornet, please,” Quirrel gasps out, the words wrecked with arousal. “May I touch you?”

“Yes,” Hornet manages, around her unfolding mandibles and the strange rumble building in her throat.

Quirrel reaches between her legs, finding her slit with trembling fingers. “Oh,” he breathes, when he touches her. “My dear.”

“Don’t  _ tease _ me,” Hornet growls, pressing her fingers deeper into Quirrel’s slits until he whines aloud.

It takes Quirrel a moment to respond, time that Hornet spends fighting her instinct to bite him for the inconvenience of delay.

Fortunately, that instinct completely dissolves when Quirrel does get his fingers inside her, up through her epigyne, clawpads pressing against her walls.

A  _ sound _ punches out of Hornet’s throat, more growl than moan, and Quirrel stops moving.

“Was that a good sound?” he asks.

Hornet snarls at him. “ _ Yes _ , now  _ stop stopping. _ ”

It makes less sense coming out than it did in her head, but Quirrel starts to move his fingers again, reminding Hornet to do the same, and for one soaring moment, nothing in Hallownest matters but Quirrel’s touch inside of her, Quirrel kissing the side of her face, Quirrel’s wet heat around her fingers, Quirrel, Quirrel, soft, sweet, Quirrel, her Quirrel.

When Hornet was young, before she understood much more than what she was told, before her mother went to sleep, before she knew that she would never have her final molt if the stasis went to plan, her father told her about his kind.

He told her, in the stilted way that he always approached things he wasn’t quite comfortable with, that being part Wyrm might lend Hornet certain traits—especially as she neared adulthood.

He’d mentioned the mating bite—an instinct spiders no longer indulged in, at the risk of hurting one another, but that Wyrms considered, in his words, ‘tantamount to a marriage ritual.’

Hornet hadn’t expected it to ever be relevant.

Then she sinks her mandibles into Quirrel’s shoulder as she cums, and feels the chitin crack under the Wyrm’s-teeth she inherited from her father, unfolded from within her jaw.

Once the ringing in her head returns to a manageable pitch, Hornet pulls her teeth out of Quirrel’s carapace. Not waiting for his reaction, she slides herself off his lap, ducking under the surface of the hot spring to wash out her mouth.

(She doesn’t think about the sweet, clean taste of his haemo, of the satisfying feeling of breaking carapace, or of the Pale King’s low hiss of a voice saying  _ tantamount to a marriage ritual. _ )

When she surfaces, Quirrel is examining the wound with what seems like mild interest.

“That was lovely,” he says, in a bright, slightly woozy voice. He must have cum, then. “Why didn’t you do that the first time?”

_ Tantamount to a marriage ritual _ , Hornet thinks. She goes back to Quirrel’s side, bending her head until her mandibles—teeth folded under once again—brush the haemo-slick wound.

Quirrel shudders all over, and pulls her back into his arms.

_ A marriage ritual, _ Hornet thinks once more, with a distant sort of panic, then forces that tram of thought to a stop. Quirrel doesn’t know—Quirrel isn’t a Wyrm or a Weaver.

It’s of no consequence, so long as Hornet keeps her mouth shut.

...in more ways than one.


End file.
